ACC Folder Link

https://acc.autodesk.com/docs/files/projects/d08eed5b-afe3-430c-815d-244f7b400fed?folderUrn=urn%3Aadsk.wipprod%3Afs.folder%3Aco.O2vOGBPLQQuSDEiukyYoyg&viewModel=detail&moduleId=folders

Link to Student

Jiahui Qiu

Journal Entry For

Module 6 - Evaluate Your Alternatives

Building Form Comparison:

1. Original building form

2. Recommended Building Form

You can see there is a lot difference between my original form and optimized form. As I mentioned in Module 5, I try to keep the height to be same (normally we have a idea of the heights). Two parameters that we adjust here is : Mid Heights and Top Rotation.

Code Logic :

I basically follow the overall logic of what we learn in Module 6. However, I introduce two new metrics to evaluate different forms.

1. Windward Surface Area:

Inspiration:

Wind is an important factor for designing a high-rise building. From the plot above, we can notice that SF has a domain direction of wind (West side). Therefore, I want to minimize the West facade surface area.

Method:

The way to calculate certain elevant area is to project the surface to a certain plane. However, our surface isn’t flat. Therefore, I separate them into several small quad panel. Then, we just need to calculate the angle between two normal vector from the panel and determined plane. Each projected area equals to A*|cos(theta)|. The projected surface area equals to total project area (enclosed) divide by two.

Realization Code:

2. Solar Access Index

Inspiration:

Energy utilization is an important factor for design. Pure Solar Potential is hard to compare with different options. Therefore, I introduce the solar access index and it can be calculated from dividing the solar potential by the floor area. This metric provides a measure of the solar energy potential per unit area, allowing for comparison between different building forms in terms of their capacity to harness solar energy for electricity or heating purposes.

Code:

Evaluation

In this part, I mainly care about three index, space efficiency, wind surface area, and solar access index. These three indexes generally describe the space, wind effect and energy usage. But, for the wind surface area, I actually want to minimize them. Therefore, based on the scaled results, I use (1-scaled results).

First, I randomly set to be 1,2,3. The best result is so prominent compared to others, which didn’t consider at all for the first two. Then, I change my evaluation strategy to be equal with three indexed because I think they are all important to my design.

Final Excel Results with 36 alternatives

Visualization

From the final visualiza results, we can observe a clear direction of the building from the effect of wind surface minimization. The space and energy also been well-utilized.

Another Shape (Very different conclusion)